Video: The Daleks Must Survive!

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the BBC science-fiction television series “Doctor Who,” and throughout the show’s run, the Daleks have been regular antagonists to the Doctor as he travels through space and time, becoming pop-cultural icons in the process. The Daleks were the brainchild of the writer Terry Nation, as Jill Lepore writes in this week’s magazine:

He invented a race of creatures mutated by an apocalyptic nuclear war who, in order to survive, live inside robotic shells and are so convinced of their own purity that their object is to exterminate every other race.

These cyborg baddies are often used as vessels for the show’s wavering messages on politics and technology. The “Exterminate!” battle cry foregrounds the sinister and threatening side of the Daleks, while their narrow field of vision makes them almost comically defective. But occasionally the show reveals these rolling trash cans as something more: characters concerned with their own mortality, and even their humanity.